Skylands Manor lease extension inked
Local volunteers may seek its overturning

By Teresa Edmond
Staff Writer
Suburban Trends
Sunday, March 29, 2009

Upset by the state granting a caterer a 10-year extension on existing Skylands Manor lease, local organizations are exploring legal avenues to get this decision overturned.

One such organization is the Skylands Association, a volunteer group that looks after Skylands Manor and the surrounding New Jersey Botanical Garden. The association hosts garden tours and throws the annual Holiday Open House at the manor.

“The only thing I understand, from what the legal people told us, is that this could be overturned…on the grounds that the Green Acres law might have been violated and that perhaps some of the lease agreements have been violated,” said Tom Grissom, Skylands Association president.

On March 16, the State House Commission unanimously granted Mansion Caterers of Montclair a 10-year extension to a 20-year operating agreement. This lease extension for the businesses’ private commercial purposes was given on two conditions, according to Marci Green, administrator for the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Office of Leases. One condition is that the Skylands Association would be allowed to host the Holiday Open House event during the first week of December. The second is for the caterer to allow public access and public tours inside Skylands Manor. The original lease didn’t require public access. If the caterer fails to abide by this, there would be justification for contract termination, Green said.

The lease, first co-signed by the DEP and Mansion Caterers in 2004, has also been rewritten to include some compromises, Green said. For example, the old version of the draft said the state had to share the cost of utilities with the caterer. Now, the caterer will fully take care of the cost. In the previous lease, the state paid the first $12,000 in electrical costs and split the fuel oil costs.

The lease is rewritten, and it could be signed “any day now,” Green said.

Grissom said he believes the state should have ripped up the contract before the lease extension because Mansion Caterers didn’t follow through with some of its agreements, like establishing an on-site restaurant. In a March 19 statement from GOP Strong, a group of Passaic County Republicans, Co-Chair Anne Marie Pusteria expressed doubt that the Skylands Manor lease extension would benefit the public’s interests.

“I have to question whether running commercial enterprises out of a historic building and limiting public access to a few days a year is a wise endeavor,” she said.

Like the Skylands Association, GOP Strong is talking to lawyers about overturning the State House Commission’s decision, according to GOP Strong member Tom Ammirato.

Even though the organizations are contemplating legal avenues to get the DEP’s decision overridden, it could be tough to do. According to Green, the state’s decision is final.

Robert Frungillo, president of Mansion Caterers, said the negotiation is “a win-win for everybody.”

“This has been our plan from day one, to have public access to the manor and to continue catering functions for the residents of New Jersey,” he said.

Mansion Caterers was accused of violating the lease by changing the manor’s name to the Castle at Skylands. The state ordered the business to change it back and it complied, Green said.

Frungillo said that the manor was called a castle for the caterer’s marketing campaign a few years ago, but other than that his business has always referred to Skylands as a manor “as far as we have been concerned.”

When word spread last year that Mansion Caterers, a Montclair-based business owned by Frungillo Caterers, asked the state to stretch out its 20-year lease on Skylands Manor by another 10 years, the public expressed worry that this extension would give the business incentive to permanently shut out public access from a historical gem maintained by tax dollars and volunteer work.

Located in Ringwood State Park, Skylands Manor was the first property purchase under the state’s Green Acres Fund in 1966. Launched in 1961, the Green Acres program has protected almost 640,000 acres of open space around New Jersey with help from private and public partners, according to the DEP Web site, NJDEP.gov.

Green said that according to the rewritten operational agreement, Mansion Caterers would get paid $100,000 annually until 2025, when it goes up about $3,000 – about 3 percent – a year to a final fee of $134,392 in 2034. The state is also supposed to get 15 percent of the total gross revenue over $2.3 million.

“We believe we worked out a good public access plan and that we struck a balance between the caterer and the public’s interests,” Green said.

Green said that the state recognized where the caterer is coming from when it asked for a lease extension. That reason is Mansion Caterers’ $2 million-plus investment in the manor’s renovation into a bed and breakfast.

The stormy topic of the lease extension has put everyone involved in tough situations.

“Unfortunately, all of us are between the rock and the hard place – the DEP, the lessee, the organizations and the taxpayers,” Grissom said.

When asked if he though politicians could have gotten more involved in the matter, Grissom said yes.

Although the Mansion Caterers operating agreement calls for the business to open up a restaurant on site, that’s “not an absolute requirement” and therefore there’s no need to terminate the lease, Green said.

The fact that a lease extension was granted to Mansion Caterers doesn’t mean other state-owned properties maintained by tax dollars could not be leased out to private businesses or have similar agreements extended, Green explained.

“We have leased out to private companies like the Trump Marina in Atlantic City, golf courses and farmers,” she said. “So we have a lot. This (Skylands Manor) isn’t unique…If someone requests an extension, we’d treat each (request) individually and look at them.”

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